Well, once again my Ruby on Rails talk, "Unified Modeling
Language on Rails: From Diagram to Web Site in Record Time", has been accepted for the IBM Rational Software Development Conference, so sometime between June 10 and June 14, I'll be presenting in Orlando. I don't have the date yet -- they'll let me know after 2/28, apparently -- but I'm excited, so I thought I'd let anybody know might care know. :)
This was a fun experience last year, so if you're going to the converence, stop by and say "hi"! Or let me know and maybe we can get together.
A company I know has discovered that all of the sites it built in the late 1990's and early 2000's are vulnerable to SQL Injection attacks, where a malicious user can obtain the contents of the database (or do other nasty things) without much effort. Every single one. I recently found (and patched) a similar problem in Syfy Portal's code. (No, I didn't write it, thankfully, but I could have.)
Turns out that SQL injection isn't the only way to perform this attack.
Good advice here.
When I worked on Special Edition Using Microsoft Word 2007, they gave me a copy of Vista to install, and I really did kind of like it. I still have it installed, anyway. But I was disappointed that the Does that Ultimate site, which is supposed to have all kinds of extras was not available. Well, apparently is now.Windows Vista Ultimate site with extras launched
Here are a couple of interesting pieces for those of you want to delve into some of the more difficult topics:
Defining SOA as an architectural style
Understanding the Model Driven Architecture (MDA)
Certainly not light reading, but how else are you going to take your skills to the next level?
For months, my installation of Microsoft Word wasn't working, and I didn't have the wherewithal to reinstall it. (Yes, I did have the CDs, just not the patience.) I was pretty sure that it was irrevocably corrupted, and I didn't wanna think about it. So imagine how surprised I was when I uninstalled some garbage I had no use for (half of which I don't even know how it got installed) and suddenly Word started working again.
I'm wondering if it might not be a good idea to look at Virtual PC, now that Microsoft has decreed that it is free, and start installing things that way so they don't conflict with each other. What started me on this? A nice piece about how to test with IE 6 when you have already installed IE 7.
Ever been frustrated trying to decipher somebody's code? Of course you have. Check out Daniel Spiewak's look at Java skill levels. Heheheheh...
When I first started at Site Dynamics (a million years ago, I think) my first action was to insist that projects actually had a specification. I know, I know, I'm a little anal that way. But funny, I just coouldn't bring myself to watch people work on projects for months at a time while the client constantly changed his mind and added features. Silly of me, huh?
Anyway, this morning I ran across a very good series of articles on Painless Functional Specifications. A must read for anybody involved in development in any way.
[UPDATE: Also check out Painless Software Scheduling.]
Yesterday, I confirmed my attendance at this years Microsoft Book Publishing Summit in March -- let me know if you're going! -- so I'm reminded of the work I did for them a few years ago.
I'm especially reminded by The Gobbledygook Manifesto -- Cutting Edge! Mission Critical! An analysis of gobbledygook in over 388,000 press releases sent in 2006. The winner?
"Next generation," with 9,895 uses, followed by over 5,000 uses each of "flexible," "robust," "world class," "scalable," and "easy to use."
The thing is, I remember using lots of gobbledygook on those Microsoft papers, because it just seemed right at the time. (Note that the Client accepted those papers.) But I wonder, how else do you say these things without seeming too casual, another whitepaper crime?
Here's something interesting. I was looking for a quick way to add search functionality to SyFy Portal when I came across the Google Custom Search Engine. You can specify a site or sites to search, including individual web pages -- for which they have the "Google Marker" app -- and you can collaborate with others on a search engine. Very interesting. I think there are community-building advantages here....
I've been hearing a lot about Second Life lately, and I think this time I'm actually going to check it out. Second Life is and immersive environment a lot like World of Warcraft, or Star Wars Galaxies, except that nobody's trying to kill you. The really cool thing about Second Life is that everything in the world, for the most part, is built by residents, and you can buy and sell these objects using "Linden dollars". What's cool about that? Well, how about the fact that you can buy and sell those Linden dollars using real dollars. Yes, that means that if you make money in second life, you can turn that into cold hard cash. How much cold hard cash? Well, apparently the exchange rate fluctuates, but as far as I can tell, it's about one American dollar to 250 Linden dollars. A lot of businesses are jumping on this bandwagon, but it's hard to tell how much of this is-will go anywhere. Still, it's interesting, and I wonder if there's a living to be made here. I've tried to check it out before, but I've never had the hardware for it. Finally, my laptop has a display it likes, although the environment supposedly is not compatible with a satellite connection. (So far, in the very limited exploring I've done, it's not too much of a problem.)
There is also a lot of talk about the educational component here; today's youth are so focused on videogames, there is a fear he that they would learn better and an immersive and are such as this one. In other words, take for example the Sarbonians, a video game meant to teach economics. Students come from an environment in which there's no scarcity, and in a crash land on an alien world with limited supplies, and they have to make a go of it. Unlike other games with an economic basis (such as Civilization), in this one characters explain why the economic principles are the way they are. Pretty cool idea, if you ask me.
What I also thought was interesting is that Linden Labs, which runs Second Life, is making use of Amazon's new distributed storage solution, Amazon S3. This is an interesting concept in which you upload your content, and they pretty much handling. You only pay for the capacity that you use. They have a compute cloud as well.
Interesting.
I rant about _blank">stupid patents all the time, but mostly because it's very rare that I see a controversial patent that I would consider "non-obvious". Maybe it's because I think about how to do these things all the time, even though I rarely have time to implement any of them. Well, I've finally had it.
I had an idea for a project last year, and it would have been fantastic. I'm not going to tell you what it was, but I can prove it would have been very successful, because I've just found out there's a company doing it, and very successfully. Now, I can deal with that. I didn't do it because I didn't have time.
But they patented it!!! So now, not only am I not the first to do this, I can't even do it at all!!
So that's it. It turns out that while a traditional Utility Patent (meaning just about everything but design patents) is only $380 to file -- more to actually have it issued and so on -- it turns out you can file a Provisional patent application for only $75. Maybe I ought to be doing that with my ideas.
I was an Inventor on 9 patents -- which, by the way, I ALSO thought were obvious, but the company disagreed -- and I remember what a pain it was to put together the application, but by G-d I've had enough!
I thought about this when I was in college, but I never had the opportunity to carry it out. Scientists are working on ways for disabled patients to control a mouse with their brain, or by thinking about moving various body parts: Wired News: Now That's Using Your Brain
Net neutrality, in case you haven't heard, is the concept that all traffic on the web should be treated fairly and equally. In other words, companies should not have the ability to give content from some providers special treatment while degrading (ie slowing down) traffic from other providers. Now Intel backs 'Net Neutrality'. According to this Wired article:
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Wednesday voted down an "net neutrality" amendment to a telecommunications bill.
With the defeat in the House, attention on the issue is expected to shift to the Senate, where Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) plan to introduce a net neutrality bill.
Telephone and cable companies have argued that the internet should remain free from regulation, and that tiered service would provide a fair way of funding their build-out of internet capacity to accommodate streaming video and other high-bandwidth traffic. They have emphasized that they don't intend to block any website or degrade any internet service.
Sometimes I think if I didn't do this for a living, I would just get out of programming altogether. I know it's not true, because I'm just hooked on it. But I do get pretty disgusted at all of the turf wars and methodology wars and acronym wars and all of the other wars that go on around new technologies. I just posted a link to a good article that pretty much tells it like it is. Do the simplest thing possible. Period. no more, no less.
This is beautiful. From Boing Boing: Senators figure out the Broadcast Flag, curse it as an abomination!:
First MIT grad John Sununu of New Hampshire said that government mandates "always restrict innovation" and then 82-year-old Ted Stevens of Alaska talked about the iPod he'd gotten for Christmas and put the RIAA's Mitch Bainwol on the spot about whether his proposal would break Stevens' ability to move digital radio programs to his iPod and listen to them in the most convenient way (it would).
[Sununu] pointed out that "we have a whole history of similar technological innovation that has shown us that the market can respond with its own protection to the needs of the artists." And he concluded with one of the most damning depictions of the ahistorical nature of the flag (clip from Congressional RealVideo) you'll hear on the Hill:"The suggestion is that if we don't do this, it will stifle creativity. Well...we have now an unprecedented wave of creativity and product and content development...new business models, and new methodologies for distributing this content. The history of government mandates is that it always restricts innovation...why would we think that this one special time, we're going to impose a statutory government mandate on technology, and it will actually encourage innovation?"
I've just posted an introductory discusion on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). What's itneresting about it is it provides away to get around the cross-domain issues you get when you try to access web services using Ajax. Yahoo's now outputting JSON in a ridiculously easy way, so this is worth checking out.
I've just put together a quick tutorial on using XML-RPC in PHP over on the InformIT XML and Web Services Reference Guide. Very cool, and VERY easy. Definitely going to use this.
one thing I love about the Web is the fact that some of the specifications are right there for you to look at to know how things are done. These days, things are getting more and more complicated, but the specs are still there. Witness Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition, explains how applications can tell not so much what you said into that phone application, but what it actually means. I am hereby predicting that in the next 12 to 24 months we will see some public use of audio text analysis. And by public, I mean an application that regular people use rather than an application used on regular people.
The other day Sarah told me she was a bit disturbed because she'd received an email from the FBI saying they'd found that she had visited illegal web sites. Having received many of these fake emails (usually purporting to be from the CIA, interestingly) my reaction was "please tell me you didn't open the file that comes with the email." Fortunately, my wife is saavy enough not to open weird attachments, so all was well, and I told her about the source of these emails: a virus, worm, or scam, take your pick.
But apparently a 20 year old in Germany had a guilty conscience, and when he received a similar email, his first reaction was to turn himself in. Police charged him on discovering child pornography on his computer.
Random House is going digital. The publishing company has witnessed what went on in the music industry, and has decided to beat Pirates to the punchby providing a way to legally access their books electronically.
"The technology was adopted before there was a business model for legitimate sales," [Richard Sarnoff, president of Random House's corporate development unit] says. "That created a fertile ground for piracy, and it became ingrained in consumer behavior."are also worried about plans by an Google & Co. to scan library books and make the content available online. And as an author, I'm in agreement with being concerned.
Technorati tags: publishing | digital | books | Random House | publishers | Google
Just recevied this action alert from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
On Thursday, November 3rd, the heads of the MPAA and RIAA present to the House Subcommittee on the Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property their plans for the future of digital technology.
For high-definition television (HDTV), the MPAA demands every receiver must have, and obey, the broadcast flag. For new radio technologies, you'll be restricted to recording radio shows for a minimum of 30 minutes, for a maximum of 50 hours. And all analog to digital video conversions will be forced to watch for, and obey, a concealed copy restriction mark.
If any one of these provisions pass, it would be a disaster for you and for innovation.
There'll be no room for open source software here. All of these devices must be "robust" -- welded shut to prevent alteration by their owners.
There'll be no room for innovation without the say-so of Hollywood. And there'll be no fair use copying without breaking the law.Please, please, please, if you live in the US, go to the EFF's site and contact your Congressperson to oppose these bills, and spread the word.
Technorati tags: congress | open source | HDTV | protest | freedom | fair use | copyright
I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but apparently Microsoft is planning a sort of online version of Windows and Office, partially to compete with Google. Here's the full story. I gotta chew on this for a while.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has broken the code that printer companies have put in, causing printers to include a tiny invisible pattern that indicates when the document was printed and the serial number of the printer that printed it. Ostensibly to foil (or at least track) counterfeiters, this deal is troubling for several reasons, perhaps put best by EFF Seniorspace Staff Attorney Lee Tien:
Underground democracy movements that produce political or religious pamphlets and flyers, like the Russian samizdat of the 1980s, will always need the anonymity of simple paper documents, but this technology makes it easier for governments to find dissenters. Even worse, it shows how the government and private industry make backroom deals to weaken our privacy by compromising everyday equipment like printers. The logical next question is: what other deals have been or are being made to ensure that our technology rats on us?
Technorati tags: privacy | government | EFF | printers | secret codes
SourceBeat looks interesting. You buy a subscription to a book, and you get 12 months of access to that book. During that time, and there may be additions, corrections, and so on. They also have an early release program in which you can start reading the book before it's actually "finished" without impacting your 12 months. SourceBeat covers open source topics.
Technorati tags: open source
My editor over at InformIT has asked me to produce some ruby content, which is nice, because I'd been planning to learn that anyway. It's just always nice to have an excuse. :-) what's also nicest having a place where you can go to get started without having to figure out where to find everything. Thankfully, Loud Thinking has provided a page for Getting started with Ruby that provides links to everything from the language itself to documentation to tutorials and such. Very nice job.
Technorati tags: Ruby | programming
I just posted some remarks on why I think we're seeing the very beginning of the end for Google.
OK, so in response to claims that Yahoo has indexed twice as many pages as Google, we have A Comparision of the Size of the Yahoo and Google Indices, in which the researchers compare the number of results returned for just over 10000 queries and conclude that since Yahoo returns fewer results, it must not have as many pages indexed, and certainly not twice as many.
But as anybody who's tried to wade through useless results has wondered, is more really better? Maybe -- and I have no reason to say this other than speculation -- Yahoo has a better way of choosing results?
Like I said, I have no idea how they decide what to display, and maybe they really don't have all of the pages they say they do. I'm just pointing out a major flaw in the experiment's methodology.
Technorati tags: Yahoo | Google | search | search engines
Some people have a knack for knowing what's coming next. And some work very, very hard at it. O'Reilly is pretty well regarded in that field, and at OSCON, Tim O'Reilly gave some insight into the numbers that help guide those predictions. Interesting stuff.
Technology: trends | technology | Oreilly | open source
The one thing I hate about not running my own server is not having root privileges. It just makes my life a bit more complicated. Fortunately, I can usually get around this little problem. When I started using PHP-Nuke, I figured out how to create my own symbolic links to my own images directory, so I could add new ones. Now I need some Perl modules, and fortunately, you can install without superuser privileges. This article is about installing mod_perl, but of course the concepts apply to anything...
(Oh, and if you can't run CPAN, you can search CPAN and download the packages manually...)
I'd like to draw your attention to a comment I made over on my InformIT blog. More than once I've been burned by a writer from India who plagiarized material. Now I hear that it's common among programmers, too. With increasing reliance on India programmers, are we creating a monster?
Technorati tags: India | plagiarism | culture | piracy
Finally someone who calls it like it is. I've been arguing for years that people are upgrading software just because they can, and not because they need to. Sure, there are people who can benefit from, say, Office's integration with XML. (I can't think of any, but I'm sure they're out there.) But that doesn't mean everybody needs it. Heck, unless I need to track changes, I can usually get by with WordPad. It'd be a waste for me. And it's not just Microsoft, even though people think that's my problem. It relates to any software. You should only have to upgrade if you actually need the new product. It's just that Microsoft is the one that is constantly trying to get people to pay for useless upgrades, so it comes up most often in discussion.
Check this out: Shared Spaces Research & Consulting: Stop! An IT Spending Manifesto
This week I'll be writing about AJAX, which is basically just a set name for the combination of techniques I've been using for years to load content into the browser without having to load a new page. (Only now, it's supported in non-IE browsers, which is wonderful.) One interesting resource I don't want to lose track of: Software As She’s Developed » Blog Archive » AJAX Patterns: Design Patterns for AJAX Usability.
My world is very complicated. I am in a profession (writing) where, for better or worse, some measure of success is given by how many people know who you are. And yet, I really am a very, very private person. I don't, frankly, like anybody up in my business, as they say. Read my work or don't, but leave me out of it. So it was with some measure of disgust and revulsion that I read Dee-Ann LeBlanc's Maureen O'Gara Strikes Again, in which she unceremoniously dumps her volunteer position at LinuxWorld Magazine because they pay O'Gara. Why? Because in their quest to discredit Groklaw's Pamela Jones, O'Gara published the most personal of personal details about her. To give you an idea, she published PJ's address and phone numbers, and that's not the most private of the information.
It's disgusting.
PJ is standing up to O'Gara. Good for her. Now she says that she's being warned that people are talking about her imminent "suicide", which is what apparently happened to someone else in this matter. She tells us unequivocably that if we hear about her suicide, it isn't.
No matter which stand you take on the SCO thing -- which is what is at the heart of the matter -- this is simply disgusting.
Technorati tags Linux | PamelaJones | MaureenOGara | SCO
I'm not for sending jobs overseas, but I have to read this comment on the news that IBM is planning to lay off 10,000 to 13,000 mostly European workers and shake my head. Keep in mind that this person is theoretically American, and English is theoretically his/her first language.
Talk about answering your own question.
In my line of work, I'm constantly looking for a way to grab screenshots. I actually paid for SnagIt!, and I like it, but I lost the activation code about 35 rebuilds ago, so now I'm glad to find Screen Grab Pro, which does much of the same thing for free.
I like all three of the Definitions of an Engineer, including the original:
An engineer is someone who can take a simple idea and see through it to the bottomless pits of messy, complexity that lies underneath.
Apparently Japanese teenages are rediscovering reading with ebooks on their cell phones.
Technorati Tag: cell phones | Japan | books | reading
Here's an interesting thought: Bill Gates Must Go from Keep Trying (via Orbit Now!).
I am now the proud user of a Windows 2000/Linux dual boot system. Not that it was easy, mind you. At one point my 160 Gig drive was reporting that it had two partitions: 82 Gig and 534 Gig. Obviously that was wrong. So Support told me I'd need to do a "low level format" but of course I had no idea how to do that.
So, they told me I needed to download a debug program. I did, then I used it to create a floppy that I could use to boot the machine. Just using fdisk (which was on the floppy, I guess) didn't work, so I had to run the following script:
A:\>debug <enter> -F 200 L1000 0 <enter> -A CS:100 <enter> xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301 <enter> xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200 <enter> xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1 <enter> xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80 <enter> (80 for hd 0 or 81 for hd 1 ) xxxx:010C INT 13 <enter> xxxx:010E INT 20 <enter> xxxx:0110 <enter> -g <enter> Program terminated normally -q<enter>
NOTE that I have no idea whether this script is particular to the Dell Precision 370 on which I was running it or whether that's the normal way to "overwrite the Master Boot Record with zeros", which is what support tells me that script does.
Definitely a "use at your own risk" kind of thing. Even if it works, the results are a completely blank hard drive. (Well, as far as the OS is concerned.)
Now here's a fun idea. The brain behind "A Consuming Experience", who unfortunatly doesn't have a name anywhere obvious, so I can't refer to it has figured out how to do "Automatic" translation of blog posts. Something to think about...
[Update: That would be a lady named "Improbulus", as I've since been chided. :) ]
Technorati tag: language
After getting some inspiration from Sean McGrath, I've decided to expand the Programmer How-To a little bit, and add tips for those niggling things that people just generally spend hours and hours on. This first one involves Jython and numeric directory names when importing code.
Sean's right, though; if we all documented these things when we figured them out, we might not spend so much time floundering around pulling our hair out.
I've discovered that I'm generally cranky when I post to InformIT. My take on a one-click aggregation solution is no exception.
OK, it's not really hacking, but TiVo has released the TiVo Home Media Engine SDK, which lets you program your TiVo using Java. The hitch, well, besides the fact that it's not supported by the DirecTV receivers, which is more my problem than a general complaint, there's the fact that "HME applications can not control any of the TiVo DVR’s scheduling, recording, or video playback capabilities."
BAH.
Now live on DevSource -- Creating a GUI Feedreader using C++, Part 1: A No-Brainer Guide to UML: "If you've never used the Uniform Modeling Language (UML) before, it can seem a little intimidating. However, UML is actually not all that difficult, once you get to be familiar with the different diagrams and how they can help you to model and document your project. This article takes you through the process of modeling an application using UML, explaining each of the different diagrams, and the basics of how they work. When you're done, you'll have enough of an understanding of UML to document your own project. You'll also have enough of an understanding to delve into UML's finer points without feeling overwhelmed."
Note that this is also the first article chronicling the development of ChaosCrusher, an RSS/Atom/syndication feedreader that will hopefully do what I want a feedreader to do.
I'm crash coursing on Python right now, and I came across Instant Python. Very cool. Very, very cool.
Oh, and I added the Python versions of Use an if-then statement, and Use a while loop, Use a for-next loop, Output to the command line to the Programmer How-To. Nothing complex, but then it looks like very little is when it comes to Python...
Have I mentioned that it's cool?
I haven't had a chance to really even thoroughly read this yet, much less play with it, but I didn't want to loose it. Apparently you can now "combine interactive advertising with streaming video. Users can actually click on objects within a running video ad to trigger an associated message" with a new product called Shoshmosis. We'll see.
Here's something interesting. Cringely proposes that the Mac Mini is actually Apple's first step into the movie distribution business. I'd have to reprint the whole thing to explain it all, but basically he proposes that Apple is preparing to dominate the pay-per-download HD movie business -- think HD NetFlix without waiting for the mail -- the way it dominates the pay-per-download music business with iTunes and iPod. If he's right, this would actually be pretty cool.
Now if I could only get an HDTV for less than an arm and two legs...
I ran across this interesting quote in an old piece about the infamous backroom deal setting webcasting royalty rates:
Every new technology medium seems to enjoy a delicious moment, between being born as a vehicle for human creativity controlled by no one, into a Pigopolistic advertising channel, controlled by very few.
What's interesting to me is how the web keeps spawning medium after medium for creative expression. As one closes down, another appears. Is this the promise of the web?
Almost a year ago, I wrote about what I want in an RSS aggregator, and now, as I actually write one in C++ (see, I told you I was doing it) I've gone back and found that all of those requests are still valid. And I still don't see anybody doing all of it.
Everybody seems to be talking about Groovy, "a new agile dynamic language for the JVM combining lots of great features from languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk and making them available to the Java developers using a Java-like syntax." I'm not entirely certain what that means, but I suspect I'm going to have to find out.
Via Ned Batchelder, IBM is releasing 500 patents for royalty-free use in open-source projects. I think we're going to see more and more of a push for open source from IBM this year.